


The Ebb of Your Tide and Its Flood

by paperiuni



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Action, Backstory, Character Study, Drama, Friendship/Love, Gen, M/M, Mages, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Qunari
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-07-23
Packaged: 2018-04-10 18:27:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4402565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bull has a long history with mages, but none quite like Dorian.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ebb of Your Tide and Its Flood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tofsla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/gifts).



> Ended up somewhere new while following Toft's prompt. Gracious thanks to Bri and James for help along the way. <3
> 
> This story depicts canon-typical prejudice against mages, elves, and Qunari.

_Your pain is the breaking of the shell_  
_that encloses your understanding._  
_Even as the stone of the fruit must break,_  
_that its heart may stand in the sun,_  
_so must you know pain._

\-- Kahlil Gibran

* * *

It is like this:

His name is Ashkaari and he is eleven when Tama takes him to the arvaarad. He shot out past her sturdy height that summer. Looking down at her gently curved horns and her mass of oily, twine-wrapped braids is strange. Like she might one day be small enough for him to protect.

"You will watch and you will listen," she says. "The saarebas are kept by the arvaarad under the Antaam, but you will go to the Ben-Hassrath. You must see with eyes unclouded."

They walk far past the orderly streets of Qunandar and onto the dust of the road. At the barracks, warriors in their crimson vitaar rest their longspears on their shoulders and bend their heads to Tama in greeting. Chalked walls glow blinding in the midday heat.

The girl that is brought to the gated courtyard is human, a viddathari, her burnt-red hair shorn near to her scalp. Older than him, fourteen, fifteen. Dressed in a breastband and breeches of unbleached linen, her brown feet caked in yellow sand.

She could be a baker's apprentice or a young clay worker from the kilns. He can't see her close enough to tell by her stance or her hands.

She is a girl. Three years and they might've been agemates in the children's compound.

A crackling film of frost creeps across the ground at her feet. It expands and shrinks in shimmering ripples. Ashkaari knows what it is, though it's only snowed twice in Qunandar in his memory.

Next to the towering arvaarad she's slim as a reed. She shakes but her bound hands remain open. When the arvaarad slots the steel-and-copper mask over her head, she makes a thin wailing sound. Her knees buckle and the frost shatters as she strikes the ground. Her keening keeps on while the chains are wound around her waist and the manacles snapped around her wrists. Tama is quiet, and so he must be quiet.

The chained saarebas veers her head and looks at him with white-rimmed eyes through the holes in the mask. Her sobs are cut by the arvaarad's grip of her arm.

The sun's hardly moved in the sky. They come out of the scant shadows of the barracks, walking side by side. 

"She mixed plaster for the builders," Tama says. "Yesterday they found the lime stores covered in ice."

He shortens his stride to match hers. The walk is a lesson. 

"Where will she go now?" he asks.

"Wherever the Antaam needs a saarebas." Tama puts her hand on his shoulder. Her fingers cover a smaller span of it each season. "The plaster-worker is no longer. One task ends, another begins, little one. _Asit tal-eb_."

" _Asit tal-eb_ ," Ashkaari says. Tama wants to hear it, and her approval is a balm, like the weight of her hand.

* * *

It is like this:

They call him Hissrad, and he's losing count of the months in Seheron. Vasaad and Kaarah are the only ones left of the team he was first assigned, hardy scrappers and fast friends both.

So he takes them both on the mission. The newcomer, Gatt, needs a steadying influence for his spitting anger, and the rest have been with him barely a season. A gang of Tal-Vashoth is moving on the supply cove outside the settlement. The ships sit in the windless heat, waiting for the harvest to fill their wooden bellies. They need to make the round trip to Par Vollen before the rains.

He'd prefer to wait until the new moon night, but the window is narrow. If he lets the intelligence grow old, the Tal-Vashoth can strike and melt back into the jungle.

He sends Kaarah, Gatt and two others around the encampment hidden in the hills. The Tal-Vashoth have no fire, only a few lean-tos fashioned from branches and canvas. Sentries are crouched on either end of the narrow glen where the rest sleep.

Across the glen, Gatt slits the throat of one guard, while Vasaad plows the other into the grass. Ligament and bone crack under his hands. Hissrad leaps over the guard's kicking legs and slips down the slope as silent as he can. The axe would sit more comfortably in his hand than the long dagger does, but every traitor they can cut down in their sleep will be one fewer to join the fight.

Blood spills slick on his gloves. He drops the body back into the hollow in the earth where the dozing woman lay. The earth smells of dew and rust--the Qunari mine iron further inland in these hills.

Then Kaarah screams as fire blossoms on the other side of the camp. Hissrad catches a glimpse of someone surging onto their feet in the heart of the blaze. The rest of the Tal-Vashoth stir in a cacophony of alarmed voices and unsheathed weapons.

The saarebas is qunari, painted with the wild, swirling vitaar of the outcasts. Ducking around a lean-to just as it goes up in a rush of flame, Hissrad bellows for order. His team trains with saarebas: a necessity when the island crawls with Tevinters. Their panic will be short-lived.

A knife flips from the dark and bounces aside from a glowing barrier the saarebas flings out. Scrambling onto her feet, Kaarah closes in with him, leading with the light spear she favours. Another familiar voice is cut off by a crunch of bone somewhere to Hissrad's left.

 _Shit._ Vasaad's scouting missed the mage. The glen is jumbled with bodies and blades. The stench of exposed viscera bursts into his nose. Someone grapples for him, a Tal-Vashoth nearly his size, and they go down into the grass and dirt in a roaring mess.

He kicks his groaning opponent away in time to see a bunch of ice spikes tear through Kaarah's body. Her spear jutting from his shoulder, the saarebas wheels. Fire flows around him like a mantle. She crumples at his feet with a pained moan that shrivels off into stillness.

Hissrad frees the axe on his back and steps sure and hard over the body of his friend. The ambient flame singes and scalds, but he's in lockstep with the pain. It is a spur, not an obstacle. The mage lifts a fist wreathed in shimmering heat. Hissrad, gritting out a curse, buries the axe blade between his sawed-off horns.

The saarebas slumps, his hands empty, the old scars of steel manacles banding his wrists.

Their dead are three. One third of the team. Vasaad has a stab wound in his thigh, torqued with Gatt's scarf. He still kneels to close Kaarah's staring eyes.

Hissrad breathes. The cove is secured. Until the next time.

* * *

It is like this:

He chooses _the Iron Bull_ as his moniker for his mission to the south. In three years' time, he leaves Fisher's Bleeders with his axe, his share of the spoils from the last job, and five of his closest comrades in the company.

In the river city of Hunter Fell he puts out the call for skilled fighters. The rangy fellow with flaxen hair gives his name as a grunt but corners both Merella and Copper in less than twenty moves. Iron Bull writes down _Grim_ in his ledger and accepts his scar-gouged hand in a clasp of welcome.

Their camp at the city outskirts has swelled to a dozen tents when the inventory of their provisions comes up short. He puts up a grudging investigation. Trust grows slow, and some of his recruits are lean with the dying winter. 

No one confesses. He sets three of his older companions on rotating watch.

After midnight on the second night they're all roused by Copper's indignant shouting. Disdaining a lantern, he's holding a sword to the throat of a ragged-looking elf. Her eyes shine with her darksight, then squeeze shut as Merella's lantern casts back the shadows.

Iron Bull takes a long look up and down the intruder. Her leathers are of good make but thin and dirty from use. One of her hands grips a bag of hardtack, the other is fisted around a white glow that ebbs and swells like a slow heartbeat.

"Apostate," Merella snaps out in her earthy Fereldan tones. "Some knife-ear from the backwoods."

Behind her, someone mumbles, "Run for the templars." A sharp noise of spittle striking the ground from Iron Bull's right.

"You lot settle now," he grumbles. "Nobody's going anywhere."

The mage's tattoos are a faint shade against her pallid cheeks. Merella's uncharitable appraisal is true in one aspect: the elf's a Dalish. As he takes a step closer, he gets a string of hissed Elvish for his trouble. Copper presses the swordpoint in so a trickle of blood breaks down her neck.

Iron Bull considers. Then he sets a leather-clad palm against the flat of Copper's sword and nudges it away. "Merella." He raises his voice. "I want every one of these knife-happy diehards back in bed in a count of hundred. Guards out, tents shut, not a fucking peep to be heard."

"But--" she dares to start. They've battled and bled together for a year. She has the makings of a solid second-in-command.

"Now," he says. "Leave the lantern."

All the while he hasn't taken his eyes from the elf. Her eyes are too wide, too sunken. She watches him back with a dipped chin, while his men trudge out past the supply wagon. Iron Bull backs up a few steps so he can grab a wineskin and a hard, dented apple from the wagon.

She jerks as he tosses them both at her feet. The incipient magic pulses in her palm. No apostate that's truly felt the dread of the templars would make a show like that.

"Eat."

From here he'd step to her left, lock her casting hand, grab her skull, twist. Light elf bones. Whatever magic sluices in her wouldn't withstand a broken neck.

Her hair is matted but pinched into a plait down one side of her head. She crouches, snags up the wine and the apple.

"The shemlen", she says. Her voice is soft and raspy. "You sent them away."

"The--" Ah. A memory of Gatt cursing comes to his aid. "Yeah. The humans. They're pretty keen on that Chantry shit on mages."

She bites into the apple and rolls the chunk on her tongue. Her left hand hovers, empty, ready to draw a spell.

 _Vashedan_. Where's an arvaarad when he needs one?

"And you?" Her Common lilts, but it's clearer than Copper's. "What are you?"

That surprises a laugh out of him. "Never seen a qunari, have you?"

"No," she says, chewing around the word.

She's in dire enough straits to steal food instead of hunting. The forest stretches for miles outside Hunter Fell: might be enough to sustain a wood-wise elf even in winter. As tattered as her leathers are she's not run wild. A tear in her leggings is darned, her hair as kept as possible.

"You got a name, apple-thief?"

"You gave me this."

"Didn't give you the half a dozen that were gone the other night. I had a watch on that wagon. You spot the guard when you came in?"

"Durgen'len--" She pauses. "The dwarf woman. With the odd hair, all to one side."

"Attar," Iron Bull supplies. "She can hear a rat fart in a busy marketplace."

Briefly her eyes cant up--almost an opening--and then snap back to him. She gestures with the apple core in her hand. "There's an oak above you, a strong branch leading to the back of your supply wagon. She was only looking out."

The elf has been alone, but she's not hardened to it. She held up the threat of her magic readily when cornered, tasted the apple for rot or poison, and is now telling him how she conducted her earlier mischief.

Iron Bull takes the rest of the apple sack, shoves a knot of onions and a packet of salted meat on top, and ties the sack shut.

"You keep your head down, Dalish," he says. "We move out to the south the day after tomorrow. There's an old ford ten miles downriver. Nobody watches it much now they put a bridge over the crossing here in town."

The gleam of her eyes shutters rapidly three times. Then she seizes the sack from where he set it on the ground, and is away in a patter of feet no louder than the rain on soft earth.

Two days later, she waits for them at the ford.

* * *

Three years on, Merella is five months dead--an arrow to the neck takes her in the Silent Plains--and Iron Bull is as sick of Tevinter as can be. That's a lot of disgust when you add it up.

At least Nevarra and Tevinter are at peace and the border open. This close to the trade route the inns will even serve qunari. Tal-Vashoth mercenaries remember a place that didn't show them the door.

Still, he sees Dalish and Skinner both twitch as a tribune of the Imperial army, bedecked in the red and gold of command, marches in the door flanked by two soldiers. The officer shouts in Tevene. Bull makes out the words _deserter_ and _bounty_. One of the soldiers begins moving efficiently through the booths.

Bull bends down over his drink. One more day until the border.

Then the commotion starts. A scream and the sound of toppling furniture send alarm rippling through the common room. A few patrons slink to the door while the soldiers are focused on their current business.

Dalish pipes up with an apprehensive, "Chief?" as Bull stands from the table.

The Imperial soldiers have pinned a kicking, thrashing figure to the floor. One of them has lost a helmet, and a bloody weal on the side of his head testifies to the recent struggle. The tribune hefts a wickedly spiked flail above his head. A fucking pointless gesture when his target is held down.

"Hey!" Bull barks. He left his axe and dirk at the door. Imperial tribunes don't play by the same rules. His grab of the man's arm is enough to spin him hard towards Bull--and Bull begins the motion a fraction too late.

The flail swings down on its chain. The spikes rake down his face in bursts of pain. Red spreads across his field of vision. His last sight is that of Skinner throwing herself bodily against one of the soldiers, her teeth sinking into his ear.

When he comes to, with a jerk of alarm, Dalish has a fold of linen pressed on his left eye and her other hand curved around his skull. His muzzy field of vision is lit by a faint, white-blue sheen. A fierce tingling sensation courses across his scalp.

"Best not to move yet," she says. "I think I got your brain to stay in the right side up."

"Crap," says Bull. "Uhh. The soldier, on the floor?"

"Alive. Stitches has him." She bites her lip. He's laid on the floor in what looks like a back room, dusty crates on shelves taking up one wall. Someone paces nearby: Skinner, judging by the gait.

"Not to be a burr in your toe," Skinner says, "but hurry it up. Can't bury three dead 'Vints for long."

"I am, I am." A hint of panic flickers in Dalish's tone. "This is not as easy as it looks."

"You _killed_ 'em," Bull groans.

"You went first, chief." Dalish chuckles, not a little morbid. "Now I'm saving your thick skull. Literally." Then her voice falls. The bluish light wanes and steadies again. "The eye is gone, though."

They told him: You will go to the south and be our eyes and ears in the human cities and kingdoms. You will take on the guise of a Tal-Vashoth and pretend to the basra. Until we call upon you again.

The saarebas are a weapon: a raw force of terror and destruction to hurl at the enemy. Their shackles would never be loosened for something as intimate as healing. To allow magic so close to the weak and the ailing is unthinkable.

Dalish's palm is sweat-damp with her effort, warm with her magic.

Bull closes his one remaining eye. "It had better scar right."

* * *

It is like this:

The world is quaking into green fire and spitting demons from new holes every day. Krem hears about a faction titling themselves the Inquisition, a maverick offshoot of the Chantry around a woman they call the Herald of Andraste.

Despite all that, they seem to be doing a neat job of restoring order in the Hinterlands. He joins up at Krem's urging, bringing with him his archers and sappers and defenders, his healer and his apostate mage.

The Herald--Lavellan--is a twig of an elf, with markings like Dalish's down her brown face and a staff on her back. She comes to the meeting in the company of another mage. This one is sheathed in silk and steel, and walks in the muck of the shore with smooth authority befitting a tamassran.

Back in Haven there's a third: an elven apostate with a sonorant voice and too much knowledge on his shoulders.

Bull slots them all in their places. The Inquisition has his pledge of loyalty while coin flows. The patterns of combat flux and settle into new forms. Dalish is one spellcaster and an invaluable surprise factor. In the Herald's company, he has to reach back to the days of fighting alongside arvaarad units. Frost and fire and thunder become staples of strategy.

He learns how they fight and where they falter. Tucks those weak spots away and thinks no more about them. He has a sharp memory.

After the Herald's failed parley with the mages at Redcliffe, one of them trails her to Haven. Not a Circle mage on the run. A blighted Tevinter.

Dorian of House Pavus, at your service, leads them boldly into Redcliffe Castle and the world is wrenched awry.

These negotiations, too, sour in short order.

The concealed Inquisition scouts leap at the Venatori soldiers, knives flashing, bodies thumping to the floor. The Venatori leader brandishes his blasted amulet, making noises about his master and ruin and world dominion. Bull shuts his ears to the broken undercurrent in the man. He's an enemy and he will go down. Sera hovers on Bull's left with a white-knuckled hand on her bow. Dismayed curses slip from her now and then.

Green light crackles around the amulet. Lavellan grabs at her staff, but the 'Vint is faster. He moves across her, his staff an arc through the air, and knocks the amulet free from the Venatori's grasp.

A whirlpool of the same sickening green surges across the dais. Darkness swells in its centre, so deep that the glimpse Bull gets hurts his eye. Something turns in his gut. White-hot gleams of lightning dance across the hall, making even Alexius shy back. Bull snatches a handful of Sera's tunic and hauls her behind a column.

"Oh, pissing _shite_ ," she wails. "Told her not to trust the mages. Bad news. No, Sera, _it'll be fine_. Clod of horseshite!"

"Yeah," Bull breathes. Fuck, fuck, fuck. There are the stunned Venatori, the staring scouts. No sign of Lavellan or Dorian. The roiling wall of darkness hangs in the air. He makes to drag his axe free of its strap.

It's ten steps up to the dais. Alexius waits. If Bull won't leave this castle alive, he'll at least bring as many of these mage assholes with him as he can.

They've taken Lavellan. They've killed the only way to shut the rifts.

"Sera," he mutters, with some rue. She stumbled into this even more by accident than him. "Cover me, will you?"

If her eyes grew any wider they'd roll out of her head. Then she nods. "Every arrow I got. Get the arseface."

Her first shaft sinks into the shoulder of a Venatori soldier, who doubles over with a cry. She flips the second to the string and Bull rounds the column from the other side, using it for brief cover.

A cold green pulse wreathes the black gap, throwing up two flaring plumes that shape into two familiar silhouettes.

"You'll have to do better than that," says Dorian as if he were commenting on a losing hand of Wicked Grace. Lavellan stumbles up a step behind him. Bull returns her glance around with a nod, reading horror and relief on her face.

Alexius, whom Dorian likened to a mentor on their way to the castle, folds to his knees like a man gutted.

In another minute, the whole mess is crowned by the entry of the Fereldan royal guard and one snappish, tight-lipped queen. Bull finds himself steered to the side with Sera and Dorian while Lavellan tries to smooth things over.

On closer inspection, Dorian seems to have seen battle. His leathers are scuffed, his cheek slashed shallowly, and the thick tang of lyrium clings to him.

"I hope that wasn't too unpleasant on this side," he says, with enduring blitheness. His eyes track the Venatori pinned by the guards. "Somewhat cavalier, I know, to simply interrupt the spell. There was little time for finesse."

"You daft or what?" Sera bursts out. "We had a frigging ball. Us against the bloody horde. Shoot them until they kill us. Grand old time, that."

"I..." Dorian looks at either of them for the first time, and his face cinches involuntarily. Bull frowns at the emotion there. Dorian has the look of man with a destination but no map to lead him there; compassion tugs at his mouth but no words form.

"Hey, we lived," Bull says, nudging Sera between the shoulders.

"No thanks to Ser Frigging Cave-Liar here. She's bloody _important_ , get it?" Her finger jabs at Dorian. "She dies, we all die."

"I am aware," Dorian says. "I did bring her back unharmed." He steels his jaw and turns away.

Unerringly his gaze lands on Alexius, on his knees between the guards, his hands bound behind his back.

Dorian is tall and solid under all those belts and artfully arranged layers. It wouldn't be so easy to simply get a chokehold. On the other hand, he's a noble. Unscarred, untried in much actual combat, unused to pain. Twist a finger, open his throat, cut his voice, Bull considers. If he has no knife to hand, kick out his knees, then move in to break his neck.

He was taught to see what others cannot. Even when the knowledge burns him.

* * *

That winter they lose Haven, find refuge in Skyhold, name Lavellan as Inquisitor. It's a smart move. As unique as she is, it's better to exploit her inevitable status than to couch it away.

That same status forces her to spend most of her time in the field. Bull largely cedes the Chargers into Krem's hands in order to trot after her up mountains and down caverns, from Orlesian hamlets to Dalish encampments.

The others move into their paths around her as he does. He takes Sera, her terror and her bravery split apart by a hair, and lets her steady herself against shared jokes and his side alike. He needles Blackwall out of his brooding and tries to find his footings around Cole.

Lavellan takes cautious steps into his world of the tavern and the training yard, meeting his men and asking for tales of Qunandar. He recognises a fellow liar in Varric, but at least the dwarf plies entertaining falsehoods.

On a mission to the Emerald Graves, they run afoul of a rift that's had time to warp the wildlife in its neck of the woods. In mid-fight, a bereskarn's talons rend Bull's armour and his back. His weapon arm drops lax, a muscle torn in the shoulder. In a billow of magic like a midwinter wind, Vivienne appears at his side.

She locks the creature's hindquarters in ice with a flourish of her staff. Her free hand seeks his hurt shoulder, alight with the warm swell of healing magic. Cassandra sprints past to put herself between them and the bereskarn. As he grits his teeth against the pain and at watching her effort, he catches the taste of ash and smoke in the air.

Murky tendrils of magic erupt from the shaggy, blood-dark fur of the blighted beast. Cassandra stops short, her shield raised while the spell works its grisly way through the bereskarn. It gives a bone-rattling bellow before its sides split open with a great wet shudder and it staggers to the ground.

"Apologies," Dorian says from behind them. "I had an opening."

The smothering sensory veil of his necromancy has nearly faded when he comes up to offer Vivienne a vial of lyrium. There are streaks of sweat on her face: she piled the curative spell on top of her combat magic without pause. Still, she shakes her head minutely. "I am quite fine, my dear. Save it for a need."

Bull raises his arm and hears the joint crack. His shoulder is wound up, but whole.

"Remarkable, I suppose." On the way back, Dorian has sort of trickled back along their line until he's in step with Bull. Bull can see the lacy columns of smoke from the fires at camp in the valley. Not much farther.

"The fight?" Bull shrugs. "Not bad. I liked the thing you did with the fire traps." Before the spell that makes the victim burst from the inside like an overripe fruit. There's magic and then there's magic.

" _Glyphs_ ," Dorian enunciates. "I'll leave tripwires and triggers to Varric."

"You hide 'em in the ground and they go _boom_. Ben-Hassrath saboteurs use gaatlok for pretty much the same thing."

Dorian sniffs with a respectable dose of disdain. "Of course. Slow match and black powder entirely compare to creating fire with your mind. I meant that you didn't balk at the timely assistance of the good madame."

"I've been running into battle with you calling lightning down on the bad guys for months, and _that_ gets you."

"It does." Dorian narrows his eyes. They're a vivid green in the leaf-dappled light. "We used to get Qunari raiding parties in Qarinus, you know. I've seen how you work your mages."

The lack of accusation is weirder than its presence would be. 

"Blame my open-minded streak," Bull says. "Saw my first Tevinter mages on Seheron. That might put a lesser guy off them for life."

"And we're far away from both." Dorian looks out along the path, meandering down into the gorge that guards the camp. The set of his shoulders is either resolute or defiant. Bull almost lays a hand there, having no other ready way to express what rises in his mind.

He's left a lot of people behind. Lost many of them in the fight against Tevinter. What would they say if he admitted that in moments the closest word for what he has for this haughty, barb-tongued 'Vint is _kinship_?

That, and other things that simmer in his throat, spark in their repartee, and wait for kindling.

* * *

It is like this:

He was sent away from Par Vollen, and he learned the customs of human lands to blend in. His race sets him apart, but that gap can be bridged with guile and good humour. Make someone laugh and you've won a foothold in their regard. Offer them what they want and that foothold widens into a ledge, even a path.

It works pretty much the same for information, influence, pleasure.

He's tumbled bored Orlesian noblewomen for their pillow talk and kitchen maids because it puts a glow on their cheeks in the morning. The southerners run wilder about sex than he's used to, but he's always liked a challenge.

He tells himself that explains Dorian, too.

Pretty, proud, prickly Dorian, who's as far from home as Bull himself. Dorian hides his curiosity poorly and his conceit not at all. He chokes on his comebacks when Bull's innuendo lands squarely. Sometimes his arrogance fades to reveal a glimpse of sweetness he doesn't know how to allow to the fore.

He comes to Bull's bed on a stormy summer night on their return journey from the Graves. Then again in Skyhold. Then on the way to Crestwood and back again. While the night-fires of All Souls' Day are tended by the pious and those that have to pretend to be, Bull fucks Dorian against the wall in his room and stifles his noises with a hand on his mouth, with fingers in his teeth, with ragged kisses when all else fails.

"I could just gag you next time," he muses in the languid aftermath, with both of them sprawled on his bed. "Free a hand for other things."

Dorian sharpens. His whole body edges with tension. "No. No, you couldn't."

Bull sets a hand on his knee and he doesn't shy away. "All right." Dorian's leg unfolds a notch, easing down. He's said _yes_ a good many times now, more often than Bull's asked any single person in a while.

"I rather enjoy the thought of rattling this hallowed silence," Dorian says, faint strain still in his voice. It mellows away word by word. "These Andrastians and their quaint conditions. There must be ten religious volumes in the library on things one is forbidden to do on holidays."

Bull quells the urge to ask if _a Qunari_ and _on a stone wall (wood is acceptable)_ were somewhere on that list of prohibitions. "Never met a people that didn't like rules. All that changes is the what, why and how." 

"Very astute. Maybe I should've expected that."

Dorian stretches, distracting in his lassitude, and rolls out of the bed. It's not a break in the mood so much as an expected next step. Whatever Bull mutters in his ear to get him hot only lasts until they come down from the peak, until hearts settle and fingers uncurl.

It should be a separation that comes easy to both of them. Bull has put two and two together based on a few caustic comments from Dorian and on what he knows about the upper tiers of Tevinter society. Their meticulous tracing of bloodlines could rival the work of the tamassrans. Casual sex is an outlet, an escape.

"Not staying for a second round?" Bull can hope, after all. If not, Cabot is not too devout to keep the tap on the ale barrel. He'll find other diversions.

"Surely you mean a third?" Dorian fumbles idly for his boot. The firelight bronzes his skin and reveals a runnel of sweat tracing its way down the hollow of his spine. Bull has a fancy of licking it off, slowly, to feel how Dorian shivers to hold his breath against the sensation.

"Crazy local custom says we shouldn't sleep 'til morning," he points out.

Dorian laughs. "Just let me weigh the joys of sorting the books on Nevarran history against the merits of staying in your bed."

Bull grumbles in mock offence. When he's here, with Dorian warm and relaxed and near, it's easy to forget.

Dorian is also fire and terror sleeved in flesh. Those same nimble hands that curl on Bull's arm or add emphasis to whatever edifying spiel Dorian is giving, pluck at the weave of the world itself. A mage is a single moment of weakness away from being lost. The Qunari never even take that chance.

The boot thuds to the floor, and Dorian leans down to trail a light, ponderous knuckle down Bull's neck. "I believe I have decided."

Half to smother his own thoughts, Bull tugs him close, all heavy, loose limbs and eager, clever fingers.

* * *

It is like this:

He forsakes the Qun on a windswept cliff's edge on the Storm Coast. Flames roar across the deck of the Qunari dreadnought, the crew tiny and desperate figures diving for the sea before the fire consumes them. He looks from the foundering ship to the hillock where Krem is gesturing wide, pulling the Chargers back into the cover of the trees. On Bull's right, Gatt is talking in rapid, bitter tones.

_Don't do this, Hissrad. You'd be declaring yourself Tal-Vashoth._

"His name is Iron Bull." The Inquisitor's voice hisses. Her unassuming calm is cracking like a mud flat in the sun.

Gatt marches off, ramrod straight, his mission already ruined by the sound of Bull's signal horn. Sera casts a dark glare at his receding back, but Lavellan's hand on her arm halts her.

Gatt. A reminder of a life gone to the wind. Yet Bull wouldn't hurt him for the world. Regrets that the Ben-Hassrath sent him, instead of someone that'd be no one.

 _Ebost issala._ Return to dust. One task ends, another begins.

"The Venatori aren't giving chase." Dorian's words are almost snatched up by the gusts. "It looks like the Chargers are clear."

A fucking bright idea it was, too, to bring Dorian along on this job. Bull will agree that their fighting styles have lodged well together, and Sera rounds out their tactics with swift archery and madcap concoctions. The Venatori went down very nicely. But Dorian has views on the Qun that he can't keep under the lid, and the day's been long enough.

"Let's head to the meeting point," Bull says, half to cut off any more dissent.

Lavellan nods, worry writ in her face. He will hear from her later. They all descend with little talk, focused on keeping their footing on mossy rock and rain-slick grass. One foot in front of the other. Same way as he wandered out from Qunandar and ever to the south.

And now what? A slow and unstoppable spiral away from all he's ever known. The thin tether on which the Ben-Hassrath had him was just snapped.

A line runs across the whole of his life along this day. Gatt will never grin to see him again. At the end of this walk, he'll greet his soldiers and thank them for a job well done. Krem lives. Dalish lives. They'll sleep on him in a drunken heap at the Herald's Rest soon enough. Stitches will herd them all to bed with prods in tender places and unfaltering _ser_ s.

Bull sighs. Live for the day. That's what he's done for years.

"You might look at it this way," Dorian says, light, low, and entirely uninvited. "Now you have the liberty to do all the things you've been doing in any case. Only without needing to pretend to your people."

"Did I ask you, 'Vint?"

He almost regrets his harsh tone when Dorian balks, a tight flinch of movement. "Ah. Not the moment for levity, is it?"

"I want your learned opinions, I'll let you know," Bull grunts.

They pause to cross an engorged stream. Bull half tosses Sera and Lavellan across, their feet sure but their legs short, and, after a snap of reluctance, reaches a hand out to Dorian as well. It must mean something that Dorian takes it. "Thank you," he says in an undertone, before breaking the handhold.

An ambiguous answer presents itself that night. Krem accepts his briefing of too few words and promises to pass the news to the others. Bull feels worn enough to let him, to take it as the gesture of not only support but also friendship that it's meant to be.

The greater moon rises bright and gibbous. Bull spreads out his axe and his knives by one of the fires. Cleaning cloths, whetstone, oil for the blades and sand for the handles. Something to keep his hands busy.

Dorian takes no pains to soften his footfalls. He sits down carefully, though, on a span of trestle bench not occupied by Bull's weapons.

"It must be different now," he begins. "Missing home is one thing. Having it shut to you for good is quite another."

Bull responds with a wordless noise, but finds himself listening.

"I... suppose I can offer the obvious condolences. Beside the matter of your men."

"Don't strain yourself." The leather wrapping has come loosened on the hilt of the knife. Bull sets it aside for later repair. "A drunken stupour and a tumble, I'll be right as rain."

Dorian makes an ungainly sound of acrid mirth. "I might point out that solves rather few problems."

"Speaking from experience, are you?"

A long silence. The fire crackles. Bull's whetstone scrapes steel. "Actually, yes," Dorian says then. "Though that's beside the point. Which is, the point is--"

Bull doesn't remember stopping; the blade and the whetstone rest immobile in his hands.

"Pardon me." Exasperation shines clear in Dorian. "I... I don't know what you need. Perhaps I shouldn't ask."

 _Maraas shokra. Anaan esaam Qun._ In truth there should be little that he requires. Lavellan laid a hand on his shoulder before she retired. At the other end of the camp, his Chargers are drifting abed. He can see no shortage of things to kill, and Skyhold awaits them at the end of each journey.

"Don't think I'll sleep much tonight," he says, only then wondering what he means by it.

"Ah." Dorian considers. "I have a book. Fereldan stories and legends. Quaint, but not entirely abysmal. I'm told I have a passable voice for narration."

Some other time Bull _will_ ask about the source of that assessment. Not now. He lets out the sigh stewing in his chest. "Sure."

"I'll be a moment."

Once Dorian returns, he takes his seat again and cracks open a rather scuffed leather volume with pages of fine vellum. A small, hardy book. With a flick of his hand, he raises a softly glowing spell wisp to hover overhead. Bull continues oiling the knife, hunched forward on the bench.

In a quiet storyteller's cadence, his accent rasping on the local names now and then, Dorian begins to read.

* * *

It is like this:

Bull has little time to find his footings after his exile, before the Inquisition is swept up in stopping Corypheus from corrupting the Grey Wardens. By all reports, Adamant Fortress has become a steaming cauldron of wrong. Cullen lays plans for an assault, Leliana all but vanishes into her scouting efforts, and requests for troops, supplies and rights of passage heap on Josephine's desk like the drifts of autumn snow outside.

Lavellan knocks on Bull's door three days before departure and tells him she'll take Cassandra and Blackwall with her instead. She is, with good reason, loath to bring all of her closest companions along at once. He nods brusquely and sends her off with a, _Kill a few for me, too, boss._

It really occurs to him that Dorian is going when Dorian climbs out of his bed well before dawn, hunts for his scattered clothing, and says, "Well, I must be off. Try to entertain yourself without me."

Bull opens his eye into a slit. Dorian is buckling the sleeve back onto his vest. There's probably a reason, now drowned in late-night sex and later conversation, as to why it's come off.

"I'll manage," he says, broken by a yawn. "Don't fall into any rifts."

"That would be impossible, as it happens." Dorian shrugs into the vest, scrubs a hasty hand through his bedhead. "You will--take care, yes?"

If not for that tiny pause, Bull would crack a grin and a joke. "Yeah. Don't I always?"

All right, so it's still half a joke. Dorian casts a probably deserved glance upwards. Then his eyes veer down to linger on Bull across the room. "Please do."

"You first, 'Vint," Bull retorts amiably.

A moment unfolds in which Dorian might move closer, not to the door. He lets it dissolve, smiles instead, soft and slight. By the time the shifting pieces in the air settle for Bull, Dorian's steps have faded down the hall.

* * *

Cullen has left orders for the Chargers to mount a mission to the ruins of Therinfal Redoubt. The templars have left, but something useful might be gleaned from their deserted refuge. Bull goes along half to stave off his own boredom. Even though their numbers are speckled with Inquisition scouts, the mood has a whiff of old times. Being on the road with his favourite bunch of assholes salves his spirits like few other things.

The search unearths a trail gone cold. Dalish pokes around the bailey and the officer quarters for an entire afternoon, an unhappy furrow between her brows. Bull sends the others to fan out through the ancient keep: templar bodies, blood spatters, growths of red lyrium, scattered and left to lie.

"What's the word, Dalish?" Dusk is coming on when he bothers her at last. She's kneeling in the bailey, scratching a charcoal drawing onto rough paper.

"A demon," she says, her lilting voice flat. "A few of the bodies have marks of possession. Little burn scars in the scalp, split fingernails, that sort of thing. They've been dead so long it's hard to tell."

"Shit." He thinks of his other company--the Inquisitor's company--on their way into the mass of demons at Adamant. Lavellan's choice to leave him behind was made at least half to protect him. It should sting. "Nothing recent?"

She shakes her fair head. "Not so much as a prickle in my nape. Whatever was here, it's turned tail."

He works to make his next breath good and deep. "Glad to hear it."

"Are you now?" Her brow quirks. "It does mean we've got a longer way to go to hunt it down."

"Not that part," Bull mutters. The part where they may camp outside the keep today and Dalish can sleep free. "Jot down anything Red can use later. We'll get the slippery bastard."

She nods, bright-eyed despite her lengthy labours, and goes back to her sketching.

Scant pieces of news are already trickling back from Adamant when they return to Skyhold. The reports are succinct little stories pinned to a raven's foot, but Leliana indulges those of them who are waiting at Skyhold. The siege was short and brutal: in spite of the archdemon appearing at the fortress, the Inquisition prevailed. Corypheus's hold on the Grey Wardens was broken.

At that point, Leliana hesitates a fraction of a breath. Likely no one around the table save for Bull--maybe Josephine, who knows her so well--even spots the pause. He may have spent even longer than Leliana at the art of reading people. There's something she isn't saying. He lets it pass.

Nobody's dead, he reasons. She mentioned the loss of Warden Stroud readily enough. Something she's waiting to entrust to them. Something she cannot.

Even so he takes more glances at the road than he might own up to. The main body of the troops will be slow to return. Winter's coming in hard, with the Inquisition's supplies lines stretched to the breaking point. The Inquisitor's probably not travelling at the pace of the infantry, though.

It snows in great clustered flakes that afternoon. Bull regretfully put on a coat and a scarf for his spar with Krem, but by the time he's knocked his second-in-command to the ground enough times for satisfaction, he's glad of it.

The guard atop the gatehouse blows two sharp, echoing notes on the horn. _Allies incoming._ It takes only moments for word to be carried down to the bailey. _It's the Herald! The Inquisitor has returned!_

Krem slinks into the tavern to nurse his bruises and work himself into Maud's good graces so she'll sneak him mulled wine for his chilled bones. Bull returns their practice weapons to the armoury. People are gathering inside the gates. Most of them are castle folk, builders, launderers, apprentice smiths. Some pilgrims and other hopefuls peer out of the tents that persist in the lower bailey.

Lavellan, by now wise to the spectacle, lets the half a dozen cavalry with them form a line between the crowd and her party. The others dismount, weary and snow-smattered, unclasping saddle bags and patting sweating horses.

Dorian's staff gives him away: the glowstone set in it gleams a dazzling white in the filtered light. He yanks back his hood and says something to Cassandra, who laughs in reply.

For a moment Bull just watches him: tired, frost-nipped, happy to be back. Maybe there is a secret on all their shoulders. Maybe Leliana was being cautious. It'll fall the way it will.

Pushing past a woman trying stridently for Lavellan's attention, Dorian comes up to Bull on the stairs. A smile nudges his lip. Snow is tumbling onto his hair, melting on his cheeks. "Here you are," he says. "And as it happens, I owe you an apology for a lie."

"Hey," Bull says. Tries to find the next word and is tripped by his own relief.

"Hello." Dorian bites at his lip. "Yes, I rather forgot the greeting. It's been... a while, no? Plenty of boring riding enlivened by the whole siege thing. I took notes on the best parts."

"For me?" Bull cocks an eyebrow. "Seriously?"

"For posterity, obviously," Dorian says with asperity and fondness all at once. Then he tucks his hands into Bull's scarf, cold-stiffened leather on thick wool, and pulls his head down.

Dorian's nose is cold on his cheek, but his mouth is gentle. Bull hums surprise into the kiss even as his arm wraps around Dorian's back to hold him up. They stand in the snow on the stairs to the upper bailey, and the familiar bedlam of homecoming goes on around them. 

"Can't wait to hear it," Bull says into the warm space between their faces. Something in him falls fast in place.

Here he is, on this day.

_Asit tal-eb._

* * *

_If he must know the ebb of your tide,_  
_let him know its flood also._  
_For what is your friend_  
_that you should seek him with hours to kill?_  
_Seek him always with hours to live._  
_For it is his to fill your need,_  
_but not your emptiness._

\-- Kahlil Gibran

**Author's Note:**

> Title (with a slight twist) borrowed from Kahlil Gibran because I accidentally _The Prophet_. That is a thing that happens.
> 
> Comments are, as always, welcome and feed the muse!
> 
> I've begun a loose sequel of sorts, from Dorian's point of view: [Shall Your Flame or Your Smoke Burden The Wind](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5126354)


End file.
